Lumina
by Ellamoni
Summary: there's another new girl, and this one's just your average mutant. at least, that's what she'd have them believe...
1. Who's they?

She wasn't there. They'd been looking for the stupid girl for two days and the snow was just falling thicker and heavier. John pulled his coat closer around him, trying to cut out the wind that was slowly building into a blizzard.

"Hey Logan!" he yelled, trying to be heard above the wind.

"What?"

"We're not going to find her in this. Why don't we go back to school and ask the professor to get a better location on her?"

"Because I don't want to be the one to tell him we gave up. What's the matter sparky, can't hack the cold?"

John narrowed his eyes, but said nothing. When the professor told them that a new student expected to be arriving from Toronto had gone missing, there hadn't exactly been a lot of volunteers to form a search party in the minus-five weather. In the end it was just Kurt, Logan and John. Logan because if anyone could find someone in 3 feet of snow it was him and John because the professor had decided that a little responsibility might straighten him out. Not that John was happy about this. Kurt, on the other hand, had actually volunteered.

John slipped on an ice-covered rock, landing face down in a snow bank. Muttering under his breath, he got to his feet, suddenly realising that the rock had blonde hair. He called out to the others.

"Hey guys! I've found her. And she doesn't look too good."

"I think she has frostbite."

"Jesus, Kurt! Do you have to appear right behind me?" Kurt ignored him, crouching to dust off the layer of snow that covered the girl.

If John hadn't tripped over her, they probably would never have found her. Unlike Kurt, who was impossible to miss in the snowy landscape, the girl blended almost perfectly into the white powder covering the ground.

"Do you think she's always that pale?" asked John in awe as Logan made his way over.

"It is hard to say. You see, she is very cold." John cursed himself at how stupid he must sound to elicit that response. But in his defence, it was hard to believe her colouring. Her skin was deathly pale and her hair was platinum. And her white coat didn't help her visibility. Finally Logan was with them.

"Are we just going to look at her or should we take her back?"

When they got her back Ororo immediately put her in intensive care, monitoring her progress every hour. For the first day anyway. Three days later, she showed no signs of improvement. But like Storm said, at least she wasn't getting any worse. And on the morning of the fourth day, the school was plunged into darkness.

"Hey, Scooter, go check the power."

"It's not the power, Logan, everything else electric is still working."

"Well, Scooter, the lights work on a different circuit."

"If you know so much about it, Logan, why don't you check the power?"

"Will you two cool the testosterone for one second and remember where we are? Any chance this is the work of one of the kids?" Storm came between them, encouraging Kurt's reply.

"How about the new girl? Does anyone know of her powers?"

The group went down to the hospital like some bizarre parade. At the door, Kurt stopped them.

"Do you think perhaps just one of us should go? So she is not scared?" They all looked at him. "Well, yes, perhaps not me…"

"Not that you're scary or anything."

"Logan!" Ororo cut in, "Look, I'll just check if she's awake. We don't know that she's behind this."

She opened the door, and was nearly blinded. A beam of white light cut into the dark hallway.

"Hey Scooter, maybe you should go."

Scott entered the room, eyes squinting in the glare even behind his ruby lenses. The ward was empty except for the bed where they had left the new girl four days before. She was now sitting up and looking terrified. And glowing.

"Hi there. Don't be afraid," he added quickly, as when he sat down on the chair beside her bed she pulled back, flinching as if he'd threatened her with a baseball bat. "I'm Scott Summers. What's your name?"

"Tevreden, mijnheer, wilde ik niet voor het gebeuren. Ik ben zeer droevig! Het gebeurt waneer ik zenuwachtig ben. Gelieve te kwetsen me niet," she finished, cowering, her pale blue eyes wide with fear. Scott leaned back, his eyebrows higher than they'd ever been before. Without moving his eyes from the luminous figure, he called out

"Kurt! Could you give me a hand?"

The navy-skinned mutant entered the room slowly. This, surprisingly, didn't seem to scare the girl. Admittedly, it was hard to see how she could get any more scared.

"Was is the problem? Will she not talk to you?"

"She's talking alright, I just can't understand her. I think she's speaking German," said Scott, rising and letting Kurt have his chair. Kurt ignored the bright light emanating from the girl and looked at her. She started speaking again.

"Ik ben droevig, ik ben een mutant als u, wilde ik niet het licht nemen." Kurt turned to Scott.

"It is not German, but Dutch. Sprichst du Deutsches?"

"Ja. Wenig."

"Gut. Ik ben-"

"Die unglaubliche Nachtgleiskette?"

"Ja!"

"Ich sah dich am München Zirkus! Ich liebe dich!" Kurt smiled at the look of joy on the girl's face.

"What? What did she say?"

"She recognises me from the Munich Circus," he said briefly, before returning his attention to the girl " Ik ben Kurt Wagner. Was ist dein Name?"

"Mein Name ist Elisabeth. Aber…" she leaned closer to him, smiling, "Leute rufen mich 'Lumina' an."

"Her name is Elisabeth. But they call her Lumina."

"Who's 'they'?"


	2. I speak English

Before Kurt could translate the question, Elisabeth bit her lip and looked thoughtful, before answering,

"I don't really know. They are just 'they'." Scott blinked.

"You speak English?"

"A little, yes."

"Then why didn't you speak to me before?" Her thoughtful look turned into a wounded pout, which was just a little childish.

"I had just woken up. And I was tired. But I am better now."

"Oh. Well, good." Scott called out to the others, "It's okay, she's… better now." Elisabeth smiled in agreement.

As the others filed in the glow emanating from the pale girl slowly faded away. It turned out; a few hangers on had heard about the new girl and were joining in the spectacle.

"Elisabeth, this is Dr Ororo Munroe, a teacher at the school. And Logan, and John, another student." Kurt noticed the others. "And Rogue, Bobby, Kitty, Peter…" There was the obligatory collection of "hellos".

"So, Elisabeth, what can you do?"

"I do…light. That is, I do things with light. It is hard to explain."

"Well, just before, when you were glowing. Has that happened before?"

"God en hemel, I was glowing??"

"So, that's a no," said Logan.

"Nein… never. But I have stolen light before." Elisabeth was eyeing John, who had given up on the new girl and had slumped against the wall, nonchalantly playing with his lighter. She raised her hand slightly, her palm directed at him. She closed her hand, and the lighter went out.

"Hey, what did you… ow!" yelped John, sucking his burnt hand. Elisabeth bit her lip as the others looked at her in confusion.

"I took only the light of the flame, not the heat," she explained knowingly. "He touched the heat."

"That's awesome!" said Bobby. "What else can you do?"

"Again, I do not know everything. If there is enough light available I can sort of, collect it, and then aim it at things? But it does not do any damage," she said, still smiling her strange smile. She leant forward, encouraging them all to do the same, much like she had done before with Kurt. "And I am working on light bending."

"What do you mean, light bending?" This was Marie, ever so slightly threatened by Bobby's reaction. Storm sat down at the end of the bed.

"Elisabeth, do you mean you can make things invisible?" Elisabeth nodded.

"Well… almost."

The next day, Storm let Elisabeth move from the hospital to a dorm room that she shared with Marie. Despite her earlier coolness, Rogue soon warmed up to her new roommate when she realised Elisabeth wasn't interested in Bobby. Within a week Elisabeth was settled, and her days were full with attending classes, and practising what she called "collecting" with Scott. Although her light didn't come from her eyes, apparently a lot of the physics involved was the same. Her nights were starting to fill up too, as Rogue, Bobby and John snuck out of dorms onto the grounds to practise their powers.

It was one of these nights when she decided to stay out a little longer, drawing in light from the streetlamps and flicking sparks at the fallen leaves. She didn't notice him approach; after all, he came out of nowhere.

"Guten abend."

"Was?? Oh, Kurt," nervous fear filled her pale blue eyes as she considered the penalty for being out after curfew. "Please don't tell the professor. I was just practising…"

"Don't worry, I will not tell. Why is it, you are always worried that someone wants to get you into trouble?"

"I'm not always worried. Just concerned."

"Alright then. So, what are you doing with the leaves?" Elisabeth smiled, embarrassed.

"You'll laugh at me…"

"Never! Please, I would like to know." Kurt noticed whenever Elisabeth talked about her powers she got a mischievous look in her eyes, the pale blue shone almost silver and her creases formed in the corners of her mouth, as if she was covering an enormous smile that was about to break loose.

"Well, according to the law of conservation of energy, energy cannot be destroyed, but it can be transformed into another variety. I am trying to convert light energy into kinetic energy and impart a force that in turn creates a reaction force as per Newton's second law of motion, and will cause the leaves to move." Kurt nodded, understanding about a quarter of what she had said.

"Well. That sounds… nice." Elisabeth smiled even wider. "Elisabeth, how old are you?"

"Seventeen. Eighteen next March." Kurt nodded, not sure what else to say, so Elisabeth filled the silence with polite small talk. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-six."

"Now let me think. I went to Munich when I was nine, so that means you were in the circus when you were… eighteen?"

"Well yes, I was. But I actually started in the circus when I was five." Elisabeth blinked.

"Kurt, if you do not mind me asking, when did you… you know…"

"When did I turn blue? Well, unlike most mutants, I was born this way."

"_Mijn goedheid!_" Noticing his uncomfortable smile, Elisabeth immediately felt ashamed. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude. It's just, I can't imagine what you must have gone through."

"So, when was the first time you noticed your powers?" Now it was Kurt's turn to notice his companion's discomfort. "I'm sorry, you do not need to tell me if you do not want to."

"It's just… I don't like to think about it much. Until I was fourteen, I had very little control over my powers. And in the last two years, I seem to develop something new every month. It is hard to say when I began."

"But you had powers before you were fourteen?"

"Oh yes. It only occurred to me a few years ago, but I think I have had my powers, like you, all my life."

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Coming soon - Elisabeth's life story... didn't want to post it all in this chapter but chapter 3 will be up soon. Please review!


	3. Q&A with Elisabeth

"You have had your powers all your life?"

"Yes. Well, no. I don't know." It wasn't just her accent that made Elisabeth hard to understand.

"I don't mean to sound ignorant, but what do you mean?"

"Well my most obvious powers are the things I do with light, and they developed later. But I also understand light, the way it works. I feel for it. And that's something I've had as long as I can remember."

"When did the other things start?" asked Kurt, clueless as to what she meant by 'feeling for it.'

"Well do you want the full story? You had better get comfortable," she smiled, taking a seat on the bench nearby and inviting Kurt to do the same. The blue German knew he should probably play the teacher card and tell her to go to bed, but there was something about Elisabeth that intrigued him. Something that made her different. Well, for a mutant.

"I was born in a smallish town near the Hague. My parents were physicists… well, my father anyway. My mother disappeared when I was four." Kurt looked down.

"I'm sorry."

"Why? I don't think you're old enough to have had anything to do with it. I don't remember her, and my father never talked about her. My father was often quite distracted with work; he even forgot to send me to school. I didn't mind, I learned to read from laboratory manuals and journals. When I was seven, my father started a new project that he forbade me to ask about. Because of it, there were always people in and out of our house, and this one man who was always checking on my father. His name was Streicher." Elisabeth shivered at the name, but Kurt froze. Stryker.

"I hated that man. He was always telling my father that I must be sent to school, and that he knew of a wonderful school in Berlin that would be perfect for me, that focussed on sciences. As soon as my father heard the word _'wetenschap'_ I was on a plane headed for Germany.

"But there was no school. We drove away from the city, deep into the Black Forest. Streicher had an institute there, for mutants. There were experiments, and tests, and…" Elisabeth took a deep breath, looking down.

"Elisabeth, you don't need to tell me this if you don't want to. But if you do want to, I can help."

"Thankyou Kurt. I'm sorry," she said, brushing her eyes, "I haven't talked about it in so long, I forget things…" She closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip. When she looked back at Kurt a second later her eyes were free of tears again.

"When I was nine I escaped. It was a nightmare; I never thought I would get out. I still don't know how I made it out of the forest alive. Soon after that I was in Munich, when I saw something that changed my life. I went to the circus." And she was smiling again. Her range of emotions was really quite extraordinary.

"Die München Zirkus?" They both smiled.

"The one and only."

"Did you like the performance?"

"No not really," said Elisabeth seriously, before breaking into another million dollar grin. "Of course, it was wonderful. Especially the one they called Nightcrawler. I thought, how could a human do such things? That was when I realised that there were other mutants, mutants who were not locked away or treated like vermin. Others like me. You know, Herr Nachtgleiskette, I think we are more similar than you think."

It was not often that Kurt Wagner was at a loss for words. No matter the situation, his mind could recall a wise saying or proverb that suited the circumstances, or if not, he was perfectly able of coming up with something philosophical. But the thought of having someone else, like him… It was something that had never occurred to him before.

He looked her over, examining her more closely. Elisabeth was not much shorter than him, maybe 5'7", and fairly slim. Her skin was pale golden, ever so slightly darker than her almost white hair. Elisabeth noticed his wandering look, and laughed softly.

"Not to look at, silly. I just feel that, oh… I don't know. People often judge you straight away because of your appearance, yes?"

"How did you guess?"

"Call it a gift. Well, haven't you ever grown tired of it?"

"Not really. I find it sad that some people only see what is right in front of them. There is so much more to people than looks… Was?" he asked, noticing her awed expression.

"What you just said. You sounded like…" she paused, changing tack. "The first time I refracted light with glass, I was so surprised to find that it made a rainbow, that a boring beam of white could have such beautiful colours in it. My father told me…" Elisabeth was still looking in Kurt's direction, but her eyes were not focused on him. She was miles away. "He told me that no matter how simple something looks at first, there is always more than meets the eye. That things are never just as they seem."

"Your father sounds quite impressive."

"He was a brilliant man." She sighed, and shook her head. "I should go back to the dorm, it is late. Kurt?"

"Ja?"

"Dankeshön."

"Bitteshön, Elisabeth."

Deciding to stay out a little longer, Kurt watched as she walked back to the school. In the strong moonlight, it was almost like she was glowing again. A strange feeling washed over Kurt as he realised that Elisabeth was the closest he had ever seen to how he imagined an angel should look. Made of light.

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So... what did you think? review and let me know, all suggestions are appreciated! & thanx to the luvlies who reviewed so far :)


	4. Glimpse of the past

A/N: "Vader" is Dutch for father and it's pronounced vah-derr not vay-duh

A/N: "Vader" is Dutch for father and it's pronounced vah-derr not vay-duh. Just letting you know, otherwise some of the emotion is lost. Enjoy!

_It was dark. Too dark, and too cold. There was a heavy frost in the air; it was sucking the life out of her. Taking her light. _

"_Tevreden… kan ik niet gaan…"_

_She forced her eyes open but it made little difference. The room was completely black. She tried to move and found she could not, wondering if this room was really a room, if she was there or not. A familiar face appeared from the darkness, the form of her father taking shape in front of her._

"_Vader, komt terug… vader!" More a prayer than a question. But he faded, melting into another face, far more menacing. A face that had haunted her dreams for as long as she could remember._

"_Hello, Elisabeth. Just another little experiment…" There it was again, that sinister spell he was always chanting at her. Lumina had no idea what it meant; the only familiar word was her name. But she had come to recognise the sound as one that was inevitably followed by pain. Pain and humiliation. This man could not be human; no human could want to infict such agony on another. But by now Lumina knew it must be her; she must be something terrible, something totally abnormal and to be dealt with as little engagement as possible. And in a way she was right. _

_She had to get out._

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Wow I sort of totally forgot about this. That's a little snippet to see if anyone's still interested. If you want me to keep going please review, otherwise I'll probably can it and start something else. Let me know!!

xox E


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